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Destroy the aerial control network—Erase the Sky!

Sky Eraser is a scrolling shooter (more colloquially known as a shoot-'em-up or just "shmup") with a simple premise—fight against a constant flow of enemies for as long as possible. This concept allowed it to be built on a reasonably short timeframe while I worked out my preferred libraries and coding styles after several failed launches (no pun intended) of other similar projects, as well as providing a good baseline for testing future technologies and ideas.

In Sky Eraser, the player is piloting a ship built using the reverse-engineered technology of a reigning alien empire, one which has conquered and subjugated the planet. The mission is one of inevitable destruction: fly as long as possible, disrupting the network of aerial control and defense nodes over the human colonies and raising as much hell as you can before you're shot down, giving the resistance time to rally the people.

Gameplay is simple; the player ship can move in eight directions and can fire in both a spread-out or forward-focused pattern whether by repeatedly tapping or holding down the fire button. A limited supply of bombs are also available to clear the screen of bullets and enemies alike, as well as creating enough confusion in the ranks to reduce the pressure on you. Enemies fly in on set formations, gradually scaling up in their frequency and firing rate as the game progresses. Destroying enemies at a rapid pace will increase your combo gauge, which adds bonuses to your score, but heavy combat will further increase their numbers and speed, leading to aggressive gameplay being met with aggressive counterassaults.

Sky Eraser is currently written in Python 2.7 with the Pygame library for the time being. A principle I'm trying to stick to is to keep the interface abstracted for the sake of being able to port it to other libraries—I will probably move it to Allegro 5 or similar in the future. The program code is released under the BSD 3-clause license, while the graphical assets are under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license.